Evolving robots

Very interesting experiment is blogged on 80beats of the Discover Magazine, To Win the Evolutionary Race, Robots Learn to Deceive. Brains of real robots were subjected to evolution, and the result was that they learned how to horde the most food for themselves, doing what they could not to attract other robots to the food, so they could have more for themselves.

Pleiotropy comes from the Greek πλείων pleion, meaning "more", and τρέπειν trepein, meaning "to turn, to convert". It designates the occurrence of a single gene affecting multiple traits, and is a hugely important concept in evolutionary biology.

I'm a postdoc at UC Santa Barbara.

All Many aspects of evolution interest me, but my research focus is currently on microbial evolution, adaptive radiation, speciation, fitness landscapes, epistasis, and the influence of genetic architecture on adaptation and speciation.